Tapping Into the Health of Your Network

Editor's Notes

• #3: [CHRIS]Today’s Webinar AgendaWhy monitor the health of your network? – what are the driving forces behind the need to monitor your networkCommon network monitoring tools – what tools are network admins currently deploying to monitor and protect the networkWhere Network Taps fit in to the monitoring picture – we’ll what a network tap is and how it fits into the monitoring architectureTypes of Network Taps and their application Network TapsRegeneration TapsAggregator TapsBypass SwitchesData Monitoring Switches
• #4: [CHRIS] [Will hand off to Aaron after this information]Our Presenter today is Aaron Janssen, Net Optics’ Field Application Engineer. Aaron brings over 15 years experience deploying and configuring security & networking equipment, including Juniper Networks, Network Associates, McAfee, and Patchlink Inc.So without further ado, I’ll turn our presentation over to Aaron.
• #5: [ AJ ]So why do we monitor the health of our networks?In today’s IT-driven organizations, network performance is key to providing excellent customer experiences, driving business process efficiencies, growing revenue, and maintaining competitive advantage. Network administrators, charged with keeping networks responsive to the needs of both internal and external customers, rely on network monitoring tools for a continuous stream of information to baseline and assess the network’s health. These tools enable administrators to ensure high application availability and good response times, to enforce network usage policies, to ensure the security of their network, to protect the network against possible downtime and to justify and measure the impact of network upgrades.A decline in network performance ultimately impacts an organization’s revenue growth by impacting on:The Customer Experience, whether it’s first-hand experience with a data-driven web application, or indirectly via customer facing employees being unable to access the data they need in order to serve the customer.Business Efficiencies, such as order processing can also be impacted by the lack of timely informationCompetitive Advantages may also be lost if the newest product or service is unavailable due to a crippled network infrastructureFinally, the ever increasing threat of unauthorized access of vital data requires a network administrator to be ever vigilant against possible security threats and the need to maintain records for regulation compliance
• #6: There are variety of devices that network administrators use to monitor and maintain various portions of their network. Most network monitoring tools are task-specific. Proprietary boxes sold as “appliances” may consist internally of standard hardware components running proprietary software, often based on the Linux operating system. The performance of these tools is determined by the speeds of the processors and memory buses, and the size of the memory utilized both for caching and for buffering packets from the network. The performance of the network interface cards (NICs) is criticaltoo, for monitoring high-bandwidth 1Gbps and faster network links. More advanced tools help to alleviate these bottlenecks by adding more processors and more dedicated buffers. The type, speed, and number of processors in a tool dictate its processing performance. As network speeds increase, the number of packets that can be processed at wire speed (in other words, keeping up with the network) reaches a limit. Buffers enable the tool to handle higher peak traffic loads by storing packets during high traffic periods, and releasing them to be processed when the traffic is less. However, the inability to sustain performance at full network bandwidth, and for extended periods of high traffic, may eventually cause even the largest buffers to fill up, and the tool may not capture needed information. Common forms of Network Monitoring Tools include the following.An IDS monitors network traffic for activity that falls within the definition of banned activity for the network. When found, the IDS will alert administrators and allow them to take corrective action, blocking access to vulnerable ports, denying access to specific IP addresses, or shutting down services used to allow attacks. This fast-alert capability makes an IDS the front-line weapon in the network administrators’ war against individuals or entities attempting to gain unauthorized access to an organizations network.Intrusion Prevention Systems are similar to IDS but are usually placed in-line and will attempt to proactively block malicious intrusions.Packet Analyzers are used to record or monitor individual packet transmissions over the network usually for diagnostic purposes to analyze network problemsNetwork forensic devices focus on the capture, recording, and analysis of network events in order to discover the source of security attacks. Network investigation tools deal with volatile and dynamic information as network traffic is transmitted and then lost, so network forensic devices are constantly analyzing and storing the traffic passing through the network.Voice Over IP Recorders are commonly found within call centers for frontline customer contact and are used to record call data for later analysis.RMON Analytics tools implement the Remote Network Monitoring standard for collecting, analyzing and reporting on packet data.
• #12: Thank you for participating in this Webinar.Within 48 hours, the slide content of this webinar as well as an audio recording, will be posted to the Net Optics website at: www.netoptics.comWe invite you to review the white papers Net Optics has available for additional information regarding the deployment of Network Taps in your environment.Online White Papers:www.netoptics.com/support/default.asp?PageID=46